A customer had a large cross-tab and he wanted to add some extra headings above the first two columns (The ‘row’ fields).  The row fields don’t normally get headings in a cross-tab but it isn’t difficult to put a couple of text objects above those columns in the empty “notch” above the cross-tabs row names.  The first he had was that the cross-tab was in the report header and spilled over to the next page.  Text objects in the report header would not repeat on subsequent pages.

Now, the simplest way to get something on every page is to put it in a page header.  But page headers don’t start printing until the report header is done, so that wouldn’t help us.  So I told the user to move the cross-tab to the report footer.  This does the same thing as the report header, and when the report footer spills onto multiple pages it includes page headers.

So now we had the text headings on every page, but they were higher then they should be. He wanted them lined up with the other headers above the cross-tab summary fields.  So the last step was to set the page header to “underlay”.  This means that instead of printing above whatever section comes next, it would print superimposed over whatever section comes next.  This made it easy to align things the way he wanted.

All this took less than 15 minutes.  So if you find that you can’t get Crystal Reports to do what want, it might be worth giving me a call.